Books
A Novel: Clown Girl
A Novel
Clown Girl lives in Baloneytown, a seedy neighborhood where drugs, balloon animals, and even rubber chickens contribute to the local currency. Against a backdrop of petty crime, she struggles to live her dreams, calling on cultural masters Charlie Chaplin, Kafka, and da Vinci for inspiration. In an effort to support herself and her layabout performance-artist boyfriend, Clown Girl finds herself unwittingly transformed into a "corporate clown," trapping herself in a cycle of meaningless, high-paid gigs that veer dangerously close to prostitution. Monica Drake has created a novel that riffs on the high comedy of early film stars—most notably Chaplin and W. C. Fields—to raise questions of class, gender, economics, and prejudice. Resisting easy classification, this debut novel blends the bizarre, the humorous, and the gritty with stunning skill.
A Headcase: Dora
A Headcase
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATERThe female Fight Club: With shotgun blasts of playful dark humor, this ballsy coming-of-age story is based on Freud's famous case study, but retold and revamped through our young protagonist’s point of view
Ida needs a shrink; or so her philandering father thinks, and he sends her to a Seattle psychiatrist. Immediately wise to the head games of her new therapist, who she nicknames Siggy or Sig, Ida begins a coming-of-age journey. At the beginning of her therapy, Ida, whose alter ego is Dora, and her small posse of pals—Little Teena, Ave Maria, and Obsidian-engage in what they call "art attacks" for teen fun and mayhem.
But Ida has a secret: she is in love with Obsidian. What's more, whenever she gets close to intimacy or a crisis of deep emotions, Ida faints or loses her voice. Ida and her friends hatch a plan to secretly record and film Siggy, and Ida intends to make an experimental art film as a tribute. As Sig becomes the target of her teen rage and angst, something goes terribly wrong at a crucial moment—Ida's father suffers an acute heart attack. Her voice lost, a rough cut of her experimental film goes underground viral and unethical media agents are trying to hunt her down to buy the material. Suddenly, everyone wants what Ida's got—but she's not willing to give it up so easily.